Tom Ross/staff

11-27-2010

It’s rare when a moose, living or otherwise, plays a pivotal role in a real estate transaction. But that’s the situation veteran Realtor Doug Labor and his wife, Mary, found themselves in this autumn. And the Labors were the buyers.

They purchased the 2,263-square-foot commercial building at 56 Ninth St. next door to Off the Beaten Path Bookstore for $652,500. And the moose came with the building, but not without a little intrigue.

“It’s pretty exciting. I think we got a pretty good deal on a building and favorable financing, which made it happen,” Labor said.

Labor is a longtime advocate of buyers agents and the owner of Buyers Resource Real Estate. He sought to purchase the building in order to bring to life a real estate education and marketing concept he’s been hatching for the latter half of the decade. But he also became enamored with a very large moose head mounted on the wall and ultimately insisted that it be part of the transaction.

“It’s a concept I’ve had for five or six years on how to attract some buyers in the market, but never had the right opportunity in place,” Labor said.

He began his real estate career years ago in Big Moun­­tain, Mont., (now White­­­fish) and later worked in Summit County. Along the way, he has authored magazine articles, notably for the now-defunct Snow Country magazine, and more recently Steamboat Homefinder.

Labor hasn’t forgotten the clever advertising campaign his friend Chris Eby, at Buyers Resource in Frisco, used to persuade clients about the advantages of working with an exclusive buyer’s representative. The central piece of art in the campaign was a stuffed moose head on a wall. The animal’s antlers were festooned with caps and hats with descriptions of various types of Realtors and accompanied by the slogan, “Which kind of Realtor are you looking for?”

When Labor spied a huge moose mount while touring 56 Ninth St., a light bulb went on. He had to have the moose to replicate Eby’s campaign.

“When I received the last counter (offer), I wrote back to the other Realtor and told him I’d accept it, but I wrote the moose into the offer. I said, ‘I’ll take that price, but I want the moose head.’”

Ultimately, Labor got the moose mount and plans to use it as a large prop to attract visitors to a touch screen tutorial on how to select a Realtor.

Real estate 101
Labor has hosted consumer education seminars in temporary locations at the base of Steamboat Ski Area. The seminars are a way to reach prospective clients. However, Labor always has packed them with carefully researched data and trends that give people who are new to mountain towns a sense of the numerical tipping points and crossroads that signal the market’s ups and downs. Labor also serves as the volunteer statistician for the Steamboat Springs Multiple Listing Service.

Labor envisions a two-story real estate center with a traditional office upstairs and the
larger downstairs area devoted to a gallery of properties and educational opportunities for people who have a casual interest in the local market or who want to begin to get serious without feeling like they have to get engaged to a Realtor.

The first floor will function more like a destination retail center where people can browse in a low-key atmosphere and then ask for more information when they are ready.

“The concept is to be more consumer-friendly and make more resources available to buyers in a one-stop shop.”

Fitting into Old Town
Real estate offices are not a use by right within the Old Town Commercial Zone District that includes 56 Ninth St., city of Steamboat Springs planner Bob Keenan said.

Several years ago, the city set aside an area in Steamboat’s historic commercial district where it wanted to encourage a vital shopping and entertainment district and made first-floor offices a conditional use. The area extends from Third Street to 13th Street and is sandwiched between the alleys behind the buildings on either side of Lincoln Avenue.

Keenan said the Planning Commission and City Council approved the Labors’ request for a permit.

“We’re saying ‘yes, that’s a real estate office but it’s designed in such a unique way that it would add more vitality to the street than a normal real estate office,’” Keenan said.

Keenan added that the city also approves of the Labors’ plan to add a portion of the sidewalk in front of their building to the outdoor cafe seating for Off the Beaten Path.

The new building has had several lives in the past decade, as a gallery of Western art, a yarn and textiles space with a classroom, a real estate sales office that continued to sell Western art while pitching multi-million dollar ranch estate lots, and a contemporary art gallery.

The Labors have plans to use the gallery floor plan to create different centers of interest on the main floor ­­— an area devoted to ranch properties, another to condominiums and a third to timeshares, for example. There will be two private rooms equipped with 20-inch touchscreens where prospective buyers can meet one-on-one with a Realtor when they want to view specific properties.

And, of course, Labor wants to persuade people about the benefits of aligning themselves with an exclusive buyers agent such as the three in his shop — himself, Susana Field and Ulrich Salzgeber.